The Debian project has announced a new major release of their iconic Linux distribution. Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" comes with Linux kernel 3.2, a "greatly improved" installer, new private cloud capabilities, and an enhanced set of multmedia codecs.

Although Debian has a lower profile with end users than it once did, the Debian project remains hugely important behind the scenes. Debian is a vast community project that has emerged through the years as a universal reference distribution for Linux developers. The strictly all-free vision of the Debian manifesto, which means the project repositories are free of any proprietary drivers or codecs, has led to the evolution of an ecosystem of derivatives that add user-friendly niceties (and sometimes non-free components) to the Debian codebase. Ubuntu, for instance, is based on Debian, and the many Ubuntu derivatives are actually Debian derivatives.

Debian takes pride in maintaining support for the broadest possible range of processor architectures, including some that commercial Linux vendors are no longer supporting. According to the Debian project, a total of nine architectures are supported, including the usual Intel-and-equivalent 32- and 64-bit architectures, but also PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, and both new and old ARM systems.

In all, the latest Debian 7.0 release includes 36,000 software packages built from 17,500 source packages.